Prosodic clitics in English-speaking children’s speech production - an acoustic study

English-speaking children have been suggested to cliticize function words as early as 2 years of age. However, several limitations to previous research, notably the absence of identical acoustic measures of cliticization across all ages, pose challenges in elucidating apparent differences between 2-year-olds and school-aged children. Thus, this study aims to apply established methods from adult research to children’s speech and provide insight into how children acoustically realize cliticization in their productions. The study explored the production of cliticization by comparing two prosodic structures: No-Clitic (e.g., Boys often cut cards) vs. Potential-Clitic (e.g., Boys often cut the cards). A total of 32 children, 3-year-olds (N=12) and 12-year-olds (N=20), were drawn from AusKidTalk, an audio corpus of Australian-English children’s speech. This selection of the corpus' youngest and oldest age groups enables an initial exploration of age-related change in cliticization. The results show that, on average across the ages, children shorten verb durations in the Potential-Clitic condition compared to the No-Clitic condition, indicating that children cliticize articles in the leftward direction. Our findings then further suggest that a trading relationship between verbs and articles exists in the process of children’s acquisition.